Almost a week ago an article was published in Nature called "Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography"
They did a massive bat data consortium involving scientists from all over the world to contribute their bat genome data
Look at all the bat:
Most exciting for me though is that they worked out the evolutionary history of the bats!!
As mentioned before in my previous post, they didn't know if the pre-bat ancestor evolved into echolocation bats and big eye bats simultaneously
turns out, echolocation bats predate the big eye bats, so they evolved out of echolocation and developed better eyesight and their nose + mouth anatomies convergently evolved to look like a rat or dog's face. Or maybe the pre-bat ancestor already looked like that and they reversed the echolocation traits. Anyway we still don't know what the bat common ancestor was, scientists thought it was some four legged small furry tree mammal, which it could still be, but now we know that bats originated in Europe first before flying to Africa and then the rest of the world.
Crazy stuff!!
Full article here if you're interested: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11007-3
Look at these cute guys
Yellow winged bat:
fun fact: 1/5 of all mammal species are bats. while 40% are rodents
